1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to graphical interface and application state recovery and, more specifically, to providing a recovery placeholder within an application to facilitate application state recovery.
2. Description of the Related Art
When working in multiple applications and tools throughout the day, users often jump from application to application, sometimes mid-thought or mid-activity. It is common that users find themselves stopping in the middle of reading a web page, document, spreadsheet, etc. However, moving on to another topic or application that has taken away the user's attention, and then attempting to return to the previous application looking for where the user has left off, is inefficient and leads to a decreased user experience.
The use of a bookmark to mark where the user was previously reading is known in the art. In one approach, a bookmarking device has a marking membrane on a panel member for marking the appropriate indicia relating to the position on the page of the literature where the reader previously left off. Another type of prior art bookmark clenches a sheaf of pages to indicate to the reader where he/she was previously reading. Yet another prior art approach provides a clasp placed on a sheet of a printed document for calling out a specific line of text within the printed document.
Many browsers also support the use of bookmarks (also referred to as aliases, shortcuts or favorites), through which a user can maintain a list of favorite sites or documents that a user expects to revisit in the future. Retrieving a bookmarked document at a later date then only requires the user to locate the bookmark corresponding to a desired document in the list, and then select that bookmark to initiate retrieval of the document.
However, what is needed is a recovery approach that goes beyond web page bookmarking and/or line indication in a static document.